No More Meadows

by Monica Dickens

  Going into Mr Parker’s office with the special autographed copies of A Golden Journey to the East, which he insisted on locking in his safe at night, although it is doubtful whether they would have interested a burglar, Christine said: ‘That Helen. She’s coming along nicely. I think she’ll be quite valuable to us soon.’

  ‘She’s awfully spotty,’ grumbled Mr Parker.

  ‘It’s her age. So was I when I was nineteen.’

  ‘Were you?’ Mr Parker peered at her through the top half of his bi-focals. ‘Come to think of it, so was I. I hated being nineteen.’

  Christine tried to picture him with all his hair, and a gawky body with red wrists dangling out of his coat sleeves. He was so hunched now into the acceptance of old age, slow and precise and sparing of his waning vitality, that it was hard to believe his juices had ever run copiously enough to force an overflow in pimples.

  ‘Well, we got Black Monkey moving for you,’ she said. ‘It might be almost cleared by the end of the week.’

  ‘I told you it would,’ he said, taking the leather-bound books from her and stooping to fiddle with the combination of his safe. ‘I told you it would sell.’

  ‘You told me to sell it, you mean. Here, let me.’ Although he never changed the combination of his safe, he sometimes had difficulty in finding it. She opened the door and put in the books. There was no money in there, because the takings were delivered to the chief cashier every day, but there was a mess of papers, a bottle of cheap brandy, and a tumbler.

  ‘In the war,’ Christine said, ‘when I was a nurse, we used to drink the brandy from the medicine cupboard on night duty and fill the bottle up with water, but I don’t see why you want to lock up the glass as well.’

  ‘So I can be sure of finding it,’ Mr Parker said.

  Outside the office, Helen came up to Christine flat-footed, pushing at her spectacles.

  ‘I don’t know what to do, Miss Cope,’ she said earnestly. ‘That man over there has been reading the Lives of the Saints for nearly half an hour and he doesn’t look as if he’d ever stop.’ She looked at her watch, which was a man’s watch with an aluminium case and a telescopic band. She did not trust the store clocks, although they were synchronized to Greenwich time.

  ‘Tell him we’re closing in five minutes,’ Christine said. ‘He should have read enough of the saints by now to avoid having to buy the book.’

  ‘But, Miss Cope, you always tell me not to disturb customers when they’re looking at books.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be so literal. Get rid of him.’ Christine turned away, irritated by Helen’s smugness and the way she drew down her mouth at the corners when she was worried.

  Helen gave her a hurt look and went towards the customer, massaging her stubby hands, and Christine thought: Oh well, perhaps she’s like that because she’s plain and has no eyebrows or eyelashes and thinks she’ll have to make a success as a career woman, if nothing else.

  Actually, however, Helen had a passionate, perspiring young man who thought she was quite beautiful and was going to marry her when he had finished his military training. She did not tell anyone about him in case they asked his name. He was called Steuart Begwater, and it embarrassed her to say this.

  At five-thirty the juniors put on the dustcovers, Alice in haste, because she had a date with the new young man in Cooked Foods, Helen sedulous as a priest. They all collected their handbags from the shelf under the humorous books. Miss Burman took out the bag of lemon tarts which she had bought in the bakery to take home to her mother, who could not get her teeth into anything except Goldwyn’s pastry, and looked anxiously in her pot-bellied handbag to see that she had got the receipt.

  If you bought anything in the store you had to show the receipt for it as you went past the timekeeper at the staff door, to prove you had not stolen it. This practice had been instituted during the war when all kinds of assistants who were not really Goldwyn’s type had to be taken on. It was a source of great effrontery to the old-timers, especially when it was rumoured through the store one day that Mrs Darby in Toys had actually had her handbag searched.

  Mr Parker tracked out of his office wearing his overcoat and the turned-down black hat that made him look as if he were the violinist from a German band. The other department managers usually left before closing time, but Mr Parker never did. As it was a trial to him to go down the stairs to the basement and up again to the staff door, the commissionaire kept one of the revolving doors open for him.

  ‘Good night all,’ he said vaguely.’ Have a nice weekend.’ On his doctor’s orders, he did not come in on Saturday mornings. He did not see how they could possibly manage without him, but they did.

  ‘You look after that cough now,’ said Miss Burman, who, from years of mothering her mother, had the instinct to mother Mr Parker too.

  Christine went down to the cloakroom with Mrs Drew, who was her friend. Margaret Drew was nice-looking the second or third time you saw her, although at first you did not notice it. She was always strictly neat. Her short black hair was like a glossy elf’s cap, her nose never shone, even on a summer working day, and if she broke a shoulder strap she sewed it at once, instead of keeping it pinned for days. She worked in the book department because her husband did not earn enough to keep them both and keep their son at a preparatory school. She hated Goldwyn’s and often said so.

  She said so tonight as she and Christine walked together to Green Park station. The warmth of the day had gone down in a thin green sunset and people were hurrying, pressing along in a crowd, unconscious of each other, because there was always a crowd every night and they were thinking only of getting home.

  ‘I’m fed up,’ Margaret said, as they waited to cross Piccadilly. ‘I’m fed with customers who can’t make up their minds. I’m fed with old Parker, I’m fed with poor old Burman calling me dear and wanting to have lunch with me, and I’m fed with the idea of going home and cooking liver and bacon for Laurie’s supper.

  ‘I’m also fed,’ she said, as the traffic stopped and they moved off the pavement like sheep in a flock, ‘with seeing disgusting unmade beds when I get home, and having to make them.’

  ‘Why don’t you make them before you come out?’

  ‘Haven’t got time. Laurie always wants a hot breakfast, and he insists on me sitting with him while he eats it, and pouring his coffee and buttering his toast, as if I were a leisured wife in a flowered housecoat with nothing to do all day but my nails. He doesn’t like me working, and so he clings to these last vestiges of a civilized marriage.’

  Christine was surprised. She had been to Margaret’s home many times, and admired her husband’s constant need of her. He did not even want to go to the corner for cigarettes unless she came too, and at a party he always spent some of the time talking to her, unlike most husbands, who treated their wives as total strangers from a party’s beginning to its end. But was being loved then such a bore?

  She imagined how it would feel to be going home to a husband instead of to an aunt and a father. You would look forward to getting home, surely. But then Christine did not know the husband she was imagining, which made him exciting. Margaret had known Laurie for twelve years, and Christine had seen her sometimes quite unaware if he touched her.

  Christine lived with her father and her Aunt Josephine in an ugly red house, redeemed by ivy, that stood on the edge of Barnes Common. The house had once been a rectory, and looked it. The downstairs rooms were high and large, and upstairs there were a lot of odd – shaped rooms which had once been nurseries for the families of prolific rectors.

  It had been cold then with a holy chill, and it was cold now, except in the bathroom, which housed a boiler and a monstrous hot cupboard and was too hot to support life for long.

  Christine did not like living in Barnes, which was neither in London nor out of it. She hated the never – ending bus ride down Castelnau, where the once grand houses nursed their shame of conversion into private hotels and apartments. But her father lik
ed to be able to walk out of his front door on to the common and swing his stick among the disheartened gorse bushes. In summer, when he could not walk without stumbling over writhing couples, he would write wordy letters to the local paper, insisting that the common be cleaned up.

  People coming to the house for the first time, travel – weary after the long, hopeless ride from Hammersmith Bridge, would say brightly: ‘Why, it’s just like the country!’ But they did not mean it.

  Christine’s mother had died in this house when Christine was fourteen. The night after the funeral Christine took ten shillings from her father’s dressing – table while he slept and ran away to Eastbourne, to the landlady of a small hotel where she and her brother had spent several holidays when they were little. The landlady gave her a breakfast of cornflakes and two boiled eggs, bought her ticket back to London and sent her home. Aunt Josephine, who was now in charge of the house on Barnes Common, gave her another breakfast, and nobody scolded her except her brother, who would have liked to go to Eastbourne too.

  Christine got off the bus and walked down the sandy side – road to her home. The house was called ‘Roselawn’, but Aunt Josephine had let Christine’s mother’s roses go to ruin because she had not time for them, and the lawn, recovered from the scars of Christine and Roger’s cricket pitch, had now succumbed again to Roger’s children, who came there at weekends to play.

  In the middle of the lawn was a small enclosure, crudely made from wire-netting bent round sticks pushed askew into the ground, and covered with a piece of sacking. Christine lifted a corner of the sacking. A round-headed, black-and-white puppy stood up clawing at the netting and bumped her face wetly.

  Neither the puppy nor the wire-netting had been there when Christine left for work that morning. She shook her head and smiled as she replaced the cover. The puppy squeaked and bounced up and made bulges in the sacking, but it was too little to get out.

  Christine did not go into the house by the front door, because she had lost her key. Her father said the police should be notified. He believed, like many people of his age who were not brought up from scratch on the engineering marvel of the Yale key, that anyone finding it would easily discover which front door it fitted. Even if they had, Christine did not think there was anything in the house worth stealing. If a burglar had come after the unwieldy old silver or the incomplete sets of china in the cabinet, he would not get past her father’s cantankerous alsatian, who hurled himself against the front door at the meekest knock, and had been terrorizing postmen for years.

  So Mr Cope went on saying that the police should be notified, and the key went on being lost, and nobody did anything about telling the police or getting a new key cut.

  Christine went in by the back door, past the dustbins and the coalshed, whose door had long ago been burst by an overflow of coke, and the bucket of garbage that Aunt Josephine put out for the man who kept chickens. The man did not really need the garbage, although Aunt Josephine insisted that she should help him, so he did not collect it too regularly, and the bucket smelled.

  With eggs so scarce in the shops, Christine’s father and aunt were always saying that they should keep chickens themselves. Eggs had been scarce since early in the war, so as it was now 1950 they had been saying it for ten years.

  Aunt Josephine was in the kitchen, cooking supper and writing letters at the same time. She wrote hundreds of letters to her relations on thin paper, with the writing criss-crossed on the back. The Cope family was large and scattered all over the globe, and Aunt Josephine made it larger by discovering second cousins in New South Wales and step-grandchildren of Copes who had long ago emigrated to Canada and lost touch with family and home.

  Aunt Josephine kept them in touch with unexciting news of who had married whom, and titbits about the royal family, and tidings of the death of people they had never known existed. She was a great one, too, for graves. She kept a little notebook with the place and date of burial of anyone remotely connected with the family, and, if geographically possible, would stumble there at the anniversary on her large turned-over feet to lay some flowers on the grave and scold the cemetery gardener for neglecting it.

  Once, a long time ago, when she had taken a trip to India to see her sister, she had discovered that a very distant cousin had been buried at sea in the Indian Ocean. She took a wreath on the ship with her, made the captain tell her when they reached the exact longitude and latitude, and cast the now withered wreath upon the sea, to the edification of passengers and crew.

  While she wrote at the kitchen table with her feet twisted round the legs, she had an alarm clock standing by the stove. It shrilled as Christine came in. Aunt Josephine cried: ‘My pie!’ and hurried to the oven, knocking papers off the table and smudging her forehead with ink as she pushed back her hair, which was like a thick, flecked off-white wool that she was still knitting into seaboot socks, because she did not see why merchant seamen should be neglected just because the war was over.

  She was a tall, ungainly woman, who moved with bent knees and elbows stuck out. Her gestures were large and uncontrolled. She was always knocking things off mantelpieces and catching her heel in lamp flexes. She and the alsatian, who swished his muscular tail among the lower furniture, caused quite a lot of havoc in the house, which was one reason why there was nothing much left to burgle.

  ‘Not done!’ cried Aunt Josephine in disgust, pulling the pie out and pushing it in again with a shove that nearly sent it through the back of the oven. ‘I can’t understand it. I set the clock so carefully, but things are always either raw or burnt.’

  ‘It would be easier if you watched them, really.’ Christine took off her beret and shook out her short hair. ‘The gas pressure’s always going up and down these days, so you never know.’

  ‘It’s the Government,’ said Aunt Josephine bitterly. ‘Well, they needn’t think I’m going to hang over my stove just to please a lot of Socialists. I’ve got far better things to do.’ She reset the alarm clock and went back to her letters, treading on one of the cats, which screeched and ran under the stove.

  Another cat, a smug tortoiseshell, crooned on the window-sill among Aunt Josephine’s plants and pots of chives and parsley. Two love-birds heckled each other in a cage on the wall, goldfish swam idly in a glass bowl on top of the refrigerator, and a very old snuffling fox-terrier slept on a blanket by the stove. Some cheese rinds and half a bun lay near his nose, but he either did not know they were there or could not be bothered to eat them.

  Christine’s own dog, which had watched for her in the road and come in with her, snatched up the cheese and the bun, rolling his eye at the fox-terrier, which would snap at him if it woke. He was a mongrel, a formless, brown-and-white wriggler, who was more like a long-legged spaniel than anything else. Sometimes you thought he would have looked better if his tail had been cut at birth. Sometimes you thought that would have made him look worse. He loved Christine with spaniel eyes all the time, and loved Aunt Josephine with drooling jaws at mealtimes.

  Aunt Josephine often grumbled and muttered about having to feed and look after all these animals, but it was she who was responsible for the presence of the cats and the birds and the goldfish and the fox-terrier, and she who had bought the mongrel for Christine when he looked at her through the bars on one of her roving visits to the Battersea Dogs’ Home.

  The alsatian was not her doing. She fed it, and let it in and out every time it wanted to go and rave in the garden at innocent passers-by, but she did not like it, because its selfish, belligerent nature reminded her of her sister’s husband, who had finally drunk himself off the map in Australia. It was her brother’s dog. Ever since he came to this house he had always had an alsatian as a protection against the wild barbarism of Barnes Common.

  ‘Well, I see you got another child,’ Christine said. ‘What’s that out there on the lawn?’

  ‘My goodness, I forgot all about her.’ Aunt Josephine ran her long tongue over an envelope flap and banged it
down with her fist. ‘The poor little thing will die of cold. Run out and get her, there’s a dear. I haven’t got my shoes on.’

  She was wearing the black leather slippers, like coffins, which she always put on as soon as she came into the house. Since she had to clean the floors, she saw no sense in bringing dirt in from outside for herself to sweep up and take out again.

  She was illogical in her care of the house. She was particular about the floors. She could not bear to see dirt on them, and yet the furniture was covered with dogs’ hairs, the mirror in the hall gave you a foggy reflection, and the telephone was thick with dust and so clogged with raw pastry from times when she had left her cooking to answer it, that you could hardly dial a number. At week-ends Christine was sometimes stirred to do some cleaning, but she got no thanks from Aunt Josephine, who liked to be the sole motive power of the house, with everybody else as passengers.

  ‘It’s a sweet little thing,’ Christine said as she came in with the puppy, slapping down her own dog, which was trying to jump up and smell the newcomer, ‘but do we really need another dog?’

  ‘It wouldn’t hurt,’ her aunt said, ‘but it isn’t ours, so don’t get excited. The Grahams have gone away for the weekend, so I said I’d look after it for them.’

  ‘You said you’d look after the Fishers’ cat over Christmas,’ Christine said. ‘That was four months ago, and it’s still here.’

  ‘I forgot, I can’t think how. And by the time I remembered, it didn’t want to go. You can’t blame it. The Fishers don’t know how to look after animals. They expected it to live off the mice it caught.’

  ‘If you didn’t feed ours so much they might catch some mice. There’s one in my bedroom cupboard.’

  ‘Well, you shouldn’t keep biscuits in there.’ Aunt Josephine made some flourishes over the paper and started another letter.